Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Late at night, Jeszcze Polska nie Zginela... Faces of Polish soccer players in a Berlin sports ring. They stand side by side, with a row of children just in front. Individual movements of their faces, each one's voice...

(La Huella: Santiago del Estero: "I learned there, as if in a wild and open university, silent and mysterious as a Salamanca, the most beautiful and representative songs of the region. Many of them I still remember. Others have remained in a dark zone of my spirit, like a secret that never could be revealed, but that nourishes the pulse of the blood.")

Atahualpa Yupanqui, Este Largo Camino

Note: The Salamanca myth has to do with the underworld--in this case, a cave open only to adepts, who are severely tested in its rites. Derives perhaps from Arab brujería (witchcraft) in the caves around Salamanca, Spain--and may be related to the Faust legend. In any case, the name struck a chord with the country people of Santiago del Estero (and elsewhere in the Argentine northwest). The folkloric musicians associated the Salamanca--and its trials--as a (mythical?) source of their musical prowess. Don Atahaulpa clearly connects with this tradition in his final sentence...

Thursday, April 23, 2009

23 April 2009. Gray morning cloud, cold. Burlap bags on bed of truck, pile of damp brown sand. Two stucco workmen in worn jeans, hands jammed in their pockets, heads thrown back, following the movements of a compatriot on scaffold high above.

New shingles pretty much like the old--minus the variations of time. Guarantees of interestingness, now gone wanting.

As with a song--Atilio Reynoso, his "Estilo Viejo"--much to recommend. Or W.H. Hudson, Far Away and Long Ago...

Monday, April 20, 2009

Friday, April 17, 2009

17 April 2009. Without and within... Richard's new book, Great Basin Poems, on earth-colored stock. Working cattle in the 1950s. An opening into a world...

Last night: cowboys and la frontera. Nuevo Lareto, Sinaloa, LA, Sleepy Lagoon. Pachucos and the Repatriation Act. Kat and Mildred take us back through time, down Mexico way--but not quite. The borderlands, rather, and an entire culture so engendered. Braceros--in the lilting and effortless voice of Pedro Infante, while film clips reveal a darker truth... Lydia Mendoza and her sister, their impossibly close harmonies, Freddy Fender, and Lila Downs. Richie Havens, too. Vision from 1958, the gym floor, Oceanside High... "Para bailar la bamba..."

Kat: "She was pregnant when they crossed the border..."

Then: Chalino Sánchez and his son, Adán, both lost. Mildred's mom: "They shouldn't of gone back..." Her own growing up in the Salinas Valley, ancestors all...

Tuesday, April 14, 2009

14 April 2009. Blue all the way across. Two workmen high up on Navigator Escrow--now the Jerome Blank Building. New shingles on an old mansard roof. Sound of hammer from a distance--reassuring... Water bottle balanced on wooden batten...

Thoughts of repair. As in a note from across time. "I have been reading Analects for about a year now..." Where we left off--the small house on California Street, upstairs. Melville's Pierre...or, the Ambiguities... The affinities, too... A sailmaker's loft in BC...

Monday, April 13, 2009

13 April 2009. Sunny with fluffy clouds to the south, filtered light. As it should be.

Long blue pipes stacked to side of street--heavy PVC with steel tubes at the ends, rusted, to join. Metaphors of emplacement. Runs and flanges...

Late in the night: a discussion of what's been written about the design of parks, following Adrián's Castellano text... Andrew Jackson Downing, Olmsted and all the rest. A move to corral the maximalization of capital--those long New York blocks with street-front galore. Sarmiento's visit--to a cemetary in Brooklyn, the Green-Wood, hyphen likewise rusted, a golden red...

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

8 April. Erev pesach...locomotive skies, a rumbly gray with dashes of light. Hamid on front walk of 7-eleven, under the eves, having a smoke...

Compadritos of Parque Patricios, barrio reo, del tiempo anterior... Walk of the porteño, somewhere in the shoulders, slightly raised, a quizzical but definite anticipation. As if a question should follow--something philosophical, but still earthy. The remnants of a Europe lost--Seurat's trees, or those of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot--wirey branches, finely limbed, taut curves with a mind of their own...

The girls of Quilmes, projected back a bit in time. Colegio Nacional in 1961--when the first handful of visitors from the liceo appeared, in starched white smocks, a tentative presence, distributed evenly amongst 500 boys... Regrouping instantly at every break...

Friday, April 03, 2009

3 April 2009. Mellow morning. Young girl, tiny hands, riding on her father's shoulders, looking this way and that... His heavy leather coat, brown courderoy trousers, emblems of masculinity...

Or Little Richard, at his baby grand, in the potched-up bathtub seat, holding first a miniature fluff towell, then a bar of soap, and finally, with a quick double squeeze, the pièce de résistance, a small inert yellow rubber ducky...

About Me

The painter Anthony Dubovsky was born in San Diego, California, in 1945. He studied with Willard Midgette at Reed College, and has lived in Warsaw, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, and Jerusalem. "An exploration in which the goal becomes a part of the discovery..." You can reach him at anthonydubovsky.com